In the 1750s, the world was still within Kant’s reach. His publications from the middle of that decade laid the foundations for an ambitious system, including a theory of the world as a whole. While pursuing totality, the young Kant also strove for unity – including, famously, a synthesis of Newtonian physics and Wolffian metaphysics – and for peace – an end to the endless controversies in metaphysics and also an antidote to the naturalists’ disquieting vision of a godless, rudderless world. In the Universal Natural History, Kant extended Newtonian ideas and methods to account for the origins and nature of the world system. At the same time, he laid out a new approach to physico-theology, opposed to both naturalism and to the Newtonian picture of a world which requires periodic corrections from God to keep it from falling apart. In rejecting this Newtonian view, the young Kant sided with Leibniz and his followers, as he also did in his advocacy of relationalism and commitment to simple substances (monads). But he was hardly a mere disciple. In the New Elucidation, he offered a new account of the grounds and scope of the principle of sufficient reason; he also criticized pre-established harmony. In the Physical Monadology, Kant argued that bodies are composed of really interacting physical monads endowed with attractive and repulsive forces. In this fashion, Newtonian and Leibnizian-Wolffian doctrines were fused in an attractive worldview, encompassing both the macrocosm and microcosm.
Then, in the 1760s, things began to fall apart. Kant started to have doubts. These extended not just to specific features of his own metaphysics and cosmology but to the very possibility of metaphysics as a science. While there is much debate about how, why and when it happened, Kant came to see the idea of the world as a whole as generating contradictions – the doctrine of the cosmological antinomy was born. One might naturally conclude from this that the critical Kant regarded cosmology as worthless, a discipline that should be abandoned. But such a reading must be balanced against the fact that in the Architectonic of Pure Reason section of the first Critique, as well as in other critical writings, Kant sketches the outlines of a critically purified science of metaphysics that includes as a part rational cosmology.
This is the story – of cosmology had, lost and then (perhaps) partly regained, albeit in a more epistemically modest framework – that Brigitte Falkenburg tells in Kant’s Cosmology: From the Pre-Critical System to the Antinomy of Pure Reason, which is ‘an enlarged and completely revised English version’ (p. viii) of her Kants Kosmologie of 2000. In it, she seeks to answer various crucial questions – about the nature of Kant’s system of 1755/1756; about when and why the shifts took place that ultimately culminated in the Antinomy; about how the thesis and antithesis arguments work and what their faults are supposed to be; about whether Kant is successful in his aims; and about whether and what sort of continuity there is between the critical and pre-critical Kant.
Kant’s Cosmology is organized into three parts, along with an appendix, which gives ‘background information on the logic of cognition prior to Kant and the ways in which Kant took it up in the methods of his systematic philosophy’ (p. 245). Part I deals with the substance and aims of Kant’s system of 1755/6 (chapter 1), as well as the philosophical methodology that underlies that system (chapter 2). Part II traces the path by which Kant comes in the late 1760s to overturn parts of his pre-critical system and its method (chapter 3), and then, in two separate steps, to arrive first at the view of the Inaugural Dissertation and then a few years later at the doctrine of the cosmological antinomy (chapter 4). Part III deals with the arguments of the Antinomy chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason (chapter 5). It also explores, among other things, the continuity between Kant’s pre-critical and critical science of metaphysics (chapter 6).
I can’t possibly hope to do justice to all the details of this rich, thought-provoking book. So I will just highlight a few claims and register a few questions and objections that the book succeeded in provoking.
Chapter 1: On Falkenburg’s telling, in 1755/6 Kant sought to lay the foundations for a ‘theory of everything’ (p. 11), at whose core was to be a ‘a coherent cosmological theory capable of unifying the opposing theoretical doctrines’ (p. 13). While this much is in line with other recent treatments of the period (see e.g. Schönfeld Reference Schönfeld2000), Falkenburg helpfully distinguishes various levels where there was conflict requiring Kant’s mediation: that of mathematical description; dynamical principle; and general metaphysical principle (p. 26). She also offers new details about the content of the system Kant developed and the specifics of his various critiques of his predecessors. This includes Kant’s reasons, having to do with the principle of sufficient reason and the nature of space, for rejecting Leibniz’s version of the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. On the subject of space, one interesting but never really developed claim is that Kant sought to reconcile ‘Newton’s view of absolute space as the sensorium dei with a relational account of space’ (pp. 25, 50). I would have liked her to say more about why (and how) she thinks this is true, especially given that she elsewhere argues (plausibly) that Kant agrees with Leibniz’s main criticisms of Newton’s theory of space in the correspondence with Clarke (pp. 82–3, 86).
Chapter 2: Falkenburg presents a sophisticated account of the method at work in the system of 1755/6 as well as the analytic method that Kant characterizes as proper to philosophy in the Inquiry (itself part of the so-called ‘system of 1762/3’: see Henrich Reference Henrich, Heimsoeth, Henrich and Tonelli1967). She situates Kant’s views in the context of the complex history of the analytic and synthetic methods. The story begins with Pappus, for whom analytic and synthetic methods are complementary parts of a ‘joint regressive-progressive method’ (p. 35). For Newton and Galileo, analysis and synthesis are complementary as well, with analysis in Newton’s case covering the so-called deduction from the phenomena back to underlying laws. In the context of Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy, by contrast, analysis is conceptual analysis while synthesis is associated with the more geometrico. Falkenburg argues that Kant’s system of 1755/6 combines elements from all of these traditions. She takes analysis in the Inquiry to refer to conceptual analysis, and to be merely analogical to Newtonian analysis, pace Schönfeld (Reference Schönfeld2000: 224) (p. 62).
While Falkenburg’s reading is illuminating and shows an impressive mastery of a wide range of texts, the narrative can be hard to follow at times. Readers may have lingering questions about the specifics of the methodology ascribed to Kant in the system of 1762/3 (whose relation to the method deployed in 1755/6 is not obvious), as well as how Falkenburg’s view relates to some other recent interpretations, such as that of Allison (Reference Allison2015: chapter 1) and Anderson (Reference Anderson2015: chapter 6). I, for one, would have liked to hear more about how metaphysics needs to draw on the results of mathematics.
Chapter 3: For Falkenburg, the collapse of the system of metaphysics and cosmology of 1755/6 occurs in two stages: first, in Dreams; second in Directions in Space. Falkenburg argues that the incongruent counterparts argument not only convinced Kant that ‘the metaphysical foundations of his pre-Critical cosmology were based on an untenable theory of space’ (p. 87); it also convinced him that ‘the analytic method had led him astray’ (pp. 87, 75). In Directions, she claims, Kant is not arguing for absolute space along Newtonian lines (p. 99), since he has already ruled out absolute space à la Newton as untenable based on broadly Leibnizian considerations: absolute space involves relations and changes of relation that are not really possible because not experienceable. When in 1768 Kant comes to believe that incongruent counterparts rule out relationalism – because relationalism leaves no room for the necessary real ground of difference between right and left hands (p. 92) – Kant is forced to conclude that the concept of space must be in some way merely epistemic and subjective (p. 99).
Falkenburg’s account is full of new insights, though (as always) one might resist some claims. I am not wholly convinced that Kant’s break with relationalism happened abruptly in 1768 because of the incongruent counterparts argument, as there are some signs of an earlier break (see De Vleeschauwer Reference De Vleeschauwer and Duncan1962: 36; Vaihinger Reference Vaihinger1892: 424–5). I am also tempted by an alternate reading wherein, instead of coming to see the analytic method as untrustworthy, Kant simply comes to see it as limited in what it can accomplish. Indeed, the analytic method appears to have an important role to play in Kant’s mature transcendental philosophy, as Falkenburg herself notes (p. 226; see as well Messina Reference Messina2015).
Chapter 4: Falkenburg rejects a common story of Kant’s development, according to which, inter alia, ‘The “great light” of 1769 consisted in the insight that the antinomy can be resolved by the 1770 theory of space and time as subjective forms of intuition’ (p. 111). As Falkenburg argues, the mathematical antinomy is only discovered after 1772. She writes: ‘According to the theory of objective cognition developed by Kant after 1772, we cannot objectively conceive of the intelligible world without conflating it with the whole of all spatio-temporal phenomena, that is, the concept of the sensible world, and vice-versa’ (p. 134). This shift is related to a change in Kant’s thinking regarding the metaphysical use of the concept of mathematical infinity. It is only with these turns in Kant’s philosophical gyre that the rough beast, the cosmological antinomy, slouches towards Bethlehem.
It is a compelling story, supported with close reading of a number of reflections. I do wonder, though, about what appears to be Kant’s continued commitment (evident in metaphysics lectures and elsewhere) to the noumenal cosmology of the Inaugural Dissertation (see here Heide Reference Heide2020). For it is tempting to view this as a real (albeit non-cognition yielding) use of reason in a conception of a non-spatiotemporal world.
Chapter 5: Falkenburg’s account of the Antinomy chapter is worthy of close study. She meticulously untangles the complex ‘epistemic, logical, and semantic’ (p. 153) considerations at play. She also offers a partial defence of the quality of the arguments and of Kant’s strategy of using the cosmological antinomy as an indirect argument for transcendental idealism. On the last point, she claims: ‘The only ingredient of transcendental idealism proper that enters into the proofs of the thesis and antithesis arguments is the 1770 theory of space and time as forms of pure intuition’ (pp. 182, 203). Readers may be troubled by this admission, since this seems to be one of the main idealistic theses Kant wishes to indirectly prove with the antinomy (A491–2/B519–20). Fortunately, it is not clear that Falkenburg really needs to concede so much.
Chapter 6: Falkenburg argues plausibly that there is substantial continuity between the systems of metaphysics of the pre-critical and critical Kant. The critical Kant’s envisaged science of metaphysics is organized along Wolffian lines, and like the system of 1755/6, aims to unify Newtonian physics with Wolffian metaphysics. As she writes: ‘The critical turn did not affect the content of the program of unification so much as the way in which Kant finally carried it out’ (p. 229). One way in which the content has carried over is that Kant has a kind of critical correlate in the Antinomy chapter to his early anti-naturalistic physico-theology. Falkenburg makes her case for this in part by considering Kant’s teleology of pure reason. This leads to a discussion of how, for Kant, the ends of practical reason are related to those of the sciences. The discussion of the ends of reason – a topic which appears to be gaining in popularity (see e.g. Watkins Reference Watkins2019: 279–83) – is a fitting end to the chapter, just as the chapter is itself a fitting end to the book.
Overall, Kant’s Cosmology is an ambitious, largely compelling book, despite occasional issues with clarity and organization. Those interested in Kant’s pre-critical or critical cosmology (or in Kant’s metaphysics more generally) are well-advised to study it.
